The effect of this scattering in those with an astigmatism is comparable to using a fun mirror in which you can appear too short, too tall or too thin.Īdults easily detect vision changes caused by astigmatism but children with the condition often don’t know that anything is wrong because they think poor vision is the norm. This diffuse refraction and improper focusing of light rays lead to a blurred or distorted vision for near and far objects. Instead of the light rays being focused to a single point on the retina, they are scattered to different areas at the back of the eye. If you have an astigmatism, the cornea or the lens is not evenly curved, so naturally you have bad vision. Fortunately, improvements in eye-care medicine have made an astigmatism a very fixable problem, either through glasses or surgery.ĭealing with an astigmatism is a lot less scary if you understand how it is caused and treated. In most cases, astigmatism co-occurs with other refractive errors such as nearsightedness and farsightedness. As a result, you will have difficulty seeing at any distance.Īs more changes in the lens take place, the astigmatism worsens, especially in people about to develop cataracts. The lack of a smooth round curvature makes it impossible to focus light on a single point. In someone who has an astigmatism, the irregular shape of either the cornea or lens causes improper focusing of light on the retina. The cornea, the clear front part of the eye, has a regular semi-circular curvature while the lens is biconvex or semi-circular on both sides. The eye is usually spherical in people with normal vision. Until then, you can stick with the classic reflection-reducing technology of contact lens.Astigmatism is a vision problem that results from an irregular curvature of the cornea or the lens. Given how often video call services like Zoom (and Microsoft Teams in particular) issue small updates and new functionalities in a constant battle to remain the most feature-rich conferencing service, it's easy to picture a glasses-blurring feature being introduced in the wake of this study. We already have the technology, with blurred backgrounds a common feature in video conferencing software. That's still a danger, so it makes sense that the study's authors have suggested a potential fix: Software that can automatically blur eyeglasses on video streams. In other words, even an HD camera will likely be limited to reflected headlines. Our research proposes near-term mitigations including a software prototype that users can use to blur the eyeglass areas of their video streams.” ~ The study “Our models further show that the evolution towards 4K cameras will tip the threshold of text leakage to reconstruction of most header texts on popular websites. In the future, when 4K cameras are common, that risk increases at least a little. Will 4K Cameras Be Able to Capture Smaller Text?Ĭurrently, the study found, the danger of a reflection revealing data through a present-day 720p webcams is fairly low, since it will only work for big fonts. The 10 mm reflection size tends to map to font size of between 50 and 60s pixels, according to an email from Long to The Register. The “over 75%” statistic refers to perscription glasses, which yielded better results than the more reflective blue-light blocking glasses in the study, due to a smaller curvature. “Our models and experimental results in a controlled lab setting show it is possible to reconstruct and recognize with over 75% accuracy on-screen texts that have heights as small as 10 mm with a 720p webcam.” The team included researchers Yan Long, Chen Yan, Shilin Xiao, Shivan Prasad, Wenyuan Xu, and Kevin Fu, who paired mathematical modeling with human subject experiments to figure out just how small a reflection could be before the text could no longer be reconstructed. The study, titled “Private Eye: On the Limits of Textual Screen Peeking via Eyeglass Reflections in Video Conferencing,” was conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan in the US in tandem with those at the Zhejiang University in China. Why Glasses Reflections Are Worth Keeping an Eye On Unless you're on a Zoom call while also taking a headline-sized look at your bank details or password list, you'll be safe. So why shouldn't you be worried about it? Because the common webcam resolution, 720p, is only capable of reading font sizes of 50-60 pixels, or the size of a particularly large headline. Could your eyeglasses reflect the screen you're looking at, leaking otherwise private information to others on a video call with you? Weirdly, the answer is yes.Ī recent study has found that popular video conferencing softwares like Zoom or Google Meet can record the glasses reflection of a computer screen in enough detail to recreate the text on that screen.
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